Have you ever wondered what your beloved pet would look like as a member of a completely different breed or species? Wonder no more, sweet reader, because Nvidia has created a face swap tool for pets aptly named PetSwap.
[jwplayer iJCeO4sH]
The company, which primarily creates graphics processors for computers, also dabbles in AI and generative networks that lead to projects such as this. Without getting too nerdy on the details, PetSwap uses an enormous bank of data to generate faces based on an input. It compares an image of your pet to the images it already has and tries its best to recreate them based on both sources of information, most of the time to horrifying effect.
If the techy details are of interest to you, you can read the research paper the tool is based on here. Let’s be real though, you came here to see what your pet would look like as something monstrous.
PetSwap – which is available here – is just a demo, so it’s pretty barebones, but that’s all it needs to be, really. To use it, jump onto the site and upload a picture of your pet and use the mouse to draw a rectangle around their face, the tighter the better. Once you’ve done that click the translate button and scroll down to see its horrors. If it doesn’t work, make sure you follow the instructions highlighted in yellow on the page to get it going. You can keep clicking the translate button for more results.
I took PetSwap for a spin with a picture of my colleague Mel‘s dog, Milly, who I think you’ll agree is very cute.
And here’s what it spat out for Milly.
Haunting. There are a fair few bung eyes getting around in that image.
For good measure, I fed PetSwap an image of myself to see what I would look like as animals. The results are… Well, they’re fucked.
Holy hell, look at this shit. Do not fuse glasses onto animal faces. Just don’t do it.
Like most of the internet, PetSwap is a good way to kill about 10 minutes. Give it a go here if you’re keen on seeing your own nightmares.
